I’m working on stylistic revision with my students, and focusing on concision — doing library research for an essay often seems to introduce all sorts of awkwardly passive circumlocutions into students’ prose, as if putting other authors’ quotations into their writing means taking their own perspectives out — so I’ll see if I can practice tonight what I’ll preach tomorrow, and avoid those big words and fancy constructions I like so much.
(A confession: as a Sergeant in the 24th Infantry Division, I took what must have seemed to my peers and soldiers an unholy glee in learning the occasional big new multi-syllable esoteric word to throw into my NCO vocabulary. Solipsistic. Epistemology. Hermeneutic. Schadenfreude. But “hegemony” never sprang from my tongue until graduate school. Go figure.)
Anyway: the toughest issue I see with my research is how to put it into a classroom context. I know it’s a theory-heavy dissertation, looking at how disciplines think and talk about the relationships between class, computers, and the economy. But “disciplines” for composition means teachers, since the discipline of composition is so bound up in thinking about teaching, and in applying theory to teaching. And in that case what ultimately matters is the students.
The problem is, one of my biggest concerns is critiquing instrumentalism, or in other words, looking for alternatives to saying, “How can we use this?” But I still want to say, “How can I use my research in the context of the classroom?” I want to show how constructing computers and literacies as mere tools in the service of a seamless and overpowering capitalist economy can be reductive and hurtful, especially to poorer students — but does wanting to “use” my research construct it as the same sort of tool?
This isn’t a dissertation that’ll convert into easy lesson plans, but that doesn’t mean it’s without use. I can apply this stuff, but maybe the point is that wanting to apply it directly is the problem. Maybe thinking about computers and literacy as something other than tools opens up new things for teachers to do, and new things for students to do, as well.
Maybe I’m looking for alternatives to writing with computers and for the economy. Maybe I need to think of ways for me and my students to write to computers or about computers, for us to write outside the economy or against the economy. Maybe that’s the kind of stuff that’ll interrupt the ways we think about class in the classroom; maybe that’s what will violate, startle, ignore, explode ideas about class structures and who belongs where and what certain types of people do with words and with computers.
I’m sure somebody’ll complain that doing things like that doesn’t teach students how to write good papers, by which they mean, it doesn’t teach students how to be well-behaved. True enough. Sergeant First Class Baca would say, “You can’t buck the system. You got to ride it.” But riding it doesn’t mean surrendering to it: that’s the quickest way I know to get trampled.
Well, get rid of “hegemony” right now, Mike. It’s an irritating, overused word. A leftist, Marxist or other progressive who can make all their points without ever saying or writing “hegemony” gets my vote.
Well, I kinda put it in there as a joke, as one of those grad-student cliché words. I get the same eye-rolling trying-not-to-snort-out-loud feel whenever I hear the types who take themselves way too seriously utter the phrase “always already”. But I’ll suggest that the word, in the way Gramsci uses it, usefully compresses into one term a whole big long phrase about how people relate to domination, so I think it’s valuable for that. It’s just that most of the taking-themselves-way-too-seriously types want to use it as a fancy synonym for “power”. Blargh.